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Hearthstone: Because what Magic really needed was F2P mechanics

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I've been playing with the new expansion out, and even though not all the cards are out the game seems so much faster than before.  almost every game I've played in the last couple of weeks has ended before turn 10, and it seems much harder to recover if the game doesn't go your way at the start.  I guess it'll still take a few weeks to see how things settle out, but at the moment this new set seems like an extreme swing away from the old gods slower more methodical games.

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I've been playing with the new expansion out, and even though not all the cards are out the game seems so much faster than before.  almost every game I've played in the last couple of weeks has ended before turn 10, and it seems much harder to recover if the game doesn't go your way at the start.  I guess it'll still take a few weeks to see how things settle out, but at the moment this new set seems like an extreme swing away from the old gods slower more methodical games.

As someone that keeps relatively up-to-date with the Hearthstone scene, it's not really the new expansion that has caused this effect. When Whispers of the Old Gods first came out, the influx of high-costed, powerful cards such as the Old Gods themselves caused a lot of people to move to slower, greedier decks. Of course, then the meta shifted to beat those decks with lightning-fast zoo decks and aggressive, curving-out based decks, and now the meta has just about shaken out.

 

The new cards from One Night in Karazhan are having an impact, but mostly people are adding them into already proven decks rather than creating new archetypes. There's still one more wing to go though, and it's definitely been more interesting to play while the new wings come out. I think there's a decent mix of decks, though slower/controlling decks aren't doing too great, and curving out is pretty much the best way to win currently.

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I've reached my highest rank ever since before the nerf of Patron Warrior where I got to rank 9 and I've been using a Tempo Mage this season to get to rank 10. It's basically because as SomethingStupid said it's all about curving out and Tempo Mage is ideal for that. It's actually my favourite iteration of the deck so far coz there's just so many options especially in the earlier turns.

 

What have you guys been playing this season? I'd like to play a more control orientated deck like a Warrior or something but I'm missing a few key legendaries like Varian and Justicar. Also with the rotation of cards happening every "year" it's making it more and more difficult to decide on which legendaries to craft. I don't really want to make either of the two I mentioned before because they'll be gone soon and I don't want to play Wild.

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First time since close to the launch of the game that I've gotten all the way up to Rank 5. Just had a fun game as Mid-Range Shaman against Miracle Rogue: https://hsreplay.net/replay/iNoCUNbXLfsvXLdSJUyqDQ

 

It was a knockdown drag-out game that I won with only 1 HP remaining.

 

Ultimately the winning play was to Hex my own Searing Totem. Because he had to use the dagger on the Frog instead of my face he was 1 damage off lethal with his Cold Blooded squire and Leeroy. In retrospect I might have had an easier time of it if I had just bumped into the squire with my Spirit Claws. He wouldn't get the free trade with my Thing From Below then before concealing. I had a few other outs to deal with the concealed squire but that was the most swag.


 

Also these replays that let you see your opponent's hand are pretty cool, although not quite as fun to watch as everything happening in-game.

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I've found it super hard to keep up with the meta this season. I tried playing beast Druid as that was pretty popular and I'd literally never played Druid before. I rocked it for about a day and then the next day the deck was useless.

The same thing happened with mid-range Shammy. Just couldn't get any draw, super bad RNG and ran into a lot of good players. It genuinely made me think I'm not very good at the game anymore.

Tried out a couple of dragon decks which imo were the most interesting decks to play but would often get wrecked by stronger players.

My highest rank is 13 this season and it looks like I won't get much higher! Oh well. I'll stop whinging. I think I just need to think ahead a lot more and think about trades in a better way.

Latrine do you play in the US or EU? If it's the EU then would it be cool if I watched a couple games of yours? My tag is ferret92

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Alas, I'm on US.

 

I think playing immediately after an expansion launch is when the meta is most in flux, which is both exciting but makes it harder to adapt. Usually I'm happy to hit rank 15 for the golden rare, but the post-launch excitement got me to climb further the past couple weekends. I keep dreaming of hitting Legend someday but apparently the climb from 5 to Legend is as long as 20 to 5 and against better opponents. I just don't have the time to do that in one month. 

 

If you really want to climb high then I recommend checking out the meta snapshot at www.tempostorm.com. It's not always 100% accurate, particularly at low to mid-tier ranks, but it gives you a lot more stats than you could hope to gather playing on your own. For example, even though they list Malygos Druid was the top deck right now (and I crafted a Fandral just to play it), the meta had already adapted and most people were playing decks that had good matchups against it. I think part of the reason I climbed to rank 5 is because I noticed Mid-Range Shaman has good matchups against most of the decks I was failing to beat with Malygos Druid.

 

And of course if you want to watch high level play there's always www.twitch.tv and www.youtube.com, I admit I often find it easier to sit down and watch than play myself. Although note that the most popular streamers are not necessarily the most skilled or best at explaining what they're doing. But they're generally still high level players and one way to practice is to try to predict what plays they'll make before they make them.

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Are you still playing Latrine? I've been playing very little compared to last season as I just find the idea of getting to rank 8 or 9 again is just such a struggle. I really do still love the game, but I often find myself just playing the same decks over and over. I mean I've been playing Zoo Lock since I started the game and it's gotten me my highest rank of 11 this season. I'm sure I could go higher if I tried but there's so many shamans and they normally destroy me. I'd also fight fire with fire, but I played the fuck out of Shammy last season. I wish they'd shake up the meta more often by rotating more often or like reintroducing certain cards from old packs or something. I feel like Wild will be utterly unplayable within a year or so. Or at least incredibly unenjoyable. 

 

I've managed to save up 3.6k gold for packs from the next expansion and will hopefully have around 4.3k or something by the time it comes out. I've also got near 2k dust which I'll probably blow on a legendary which seems OP at first but is actually total garbage. 

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Yeah, I'm still playing but haven't had time to rank up very much recently. Mostly just clear out quests when I can. The current meta does feel stale with mid-range shaman dominating, that usually happens before an expansion. Hopefully MSG will shake things up soon and there will be an even bigger shake up when Standard rotates on the next expansion.

 

I've only been playing super low rank Wild to get rid of crappy but easy to do quests like play 10 Pirates. But from what I hear it's already dominated by previous top meta decks like Secret Paladin. Personally I'm hoping Wild will eventually get its own weird overpowered decks that are only possible in Wild, that'll make it more interesting than what it is now. But I don't think it will ever be balanced to the same degree as Standard is.

 

I wouldn't recommend crafting any legendary within the first few weeks, you never know how the meta is going to shake out. There's probably some important Classic legendary cards that would be a better choice. Also at this point looking at the currently released Legendary cards, there isn't any I would guess would definitely make an impact since they pretty much all require the other new cards to build a new deck around.

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Yeah, I've managed to get to rank 11 but I haven't really played for any extended period of time in an attempt to climb any higher. 

 

I think I'm gonna focus on arena a bit more after I've bought my packs with my saved up gold. I tried it this season but then thought better of it as I can get a fair amount of packs with the gold instead, and arena could give me some of the packs. I really can't wait to bust open all those packs! They did a really good job of making opening packs super exciting. You'll have to let me know what you get. I was SUPER unlucky with my WoTOG packs. I opened about 50 and got like 1 legendary and I think it was Nat The Dark Fisher. 

 

I'm only joking about making the legendaries, but my god is it tempting. I'm not really missing many classic cards for classes I normally play so I don't mind crafting some of the new epics etc. I always prefer epics over legendaries anyway. 

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4 hours ago, Deadpan said:

Got my first Gadgetzan legendary.

 

It's... Patches the Pirate :/

 
 

 

Patches the Pirate is one of the best legendaries in the new set. Pirate Warrior is one of the two most popular decks right now and I think Patches is one of only two legendaries in that deck.

 

The reason it's good is because you'll often play a pirate on turn 1 and basically get a free 1/1 with charge for absolutely no cost, both no mana and no card used. In fact it has a benefit in that it thins your deck making it so that you effectively play a 29 card deck, making it more likely to draw one of your better cards. Aggro decks would only play 20 cards if they could. Also early board clears that deal with both the pirate you play and Patches are rare so it's likely that he'll do somewhere between 3-5 face damage for free.

 

It remains to be seen if Pirate Warrior will get countered in the meta, but for now it's one of the top decks that's inexpensive to build and easy to play.

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I realize the card has potential but it's for a deck type I have none of the building blocks for.

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New expansion! New year! New release schedule! New cards! New key word! New type of card! New new new!

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I've recently gotten back into this and really enjoy spending an hour every evening noodling on the iPad with Hearthstone. It's been a weird transition. I only ever had one decent deck, but suddenly I had to readjust to this entirely new meta and like five expansions with new synergies. Rather than coping with that, I just plunged into One Night In Karazhan, which is a lot of fun.

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If you haven't tried it, I recommend checking out the revamped arena. It's been totally rebalanced and feels quite different from before (in both good and bad ways). I just finished an 11-3 Rogue run today that's been one of the most tense and fun arena experiences I've had in a while. There was one memorable game against a Hunter where he played out two huge minions and was 1 damage off lethal and I had to make the hard decision to not trade and go wide with my board to threaten my own lethal. When they didn't draw lethal they had to make unfavorable trades into my board and I was able to edge out the win in the next few turns.

 

The main difference with the new arena is that certain key swing cards, AoE and hard removal spells, are now much more likely. It's harder to establish a dominant board position that your opponent can't overcome and you have to play around the specific swing cards they're likely to have to prevent a huge reversal. It feels much more like arena did closer to the game's launch era whereas recently there were too many cards to play around and any specific one was too unlikely to play around. And even though going to Standard removed a good chunk of cards, the fact that Rares and Epics show up more frequently still makes it feel like there's a new expanded card pool. 

 

If you want to try out the arena here are some pro tips for the current meta (based on tips I picked up from the Lightforge podcast):

- If you use current arena tier lists, take them with a grain of salt since they haven't adjusted to the new meta yet.

- It's hard to say what the top classes are since the meta is so new but I'd stick with these top 5 if you can: Warlock, Mage, Rogue, Priest, Shaman

- Two drops were hit hardest by the switch to standard, it's no longer possible or a priority to draft a lot of them. If you have a choice, go for 3/2s.

- There are even fewer good one drops left, perhaps just Mistress of Mixtures and Worgen Infiltrator who can trade into 3/2s. Even then they may only be useful with a ping class.

- The reason one and two drops have to be re-evaluated is because the most common three drop is now a 4/3 and will likely be the first minion a player can play most of the time. 

- The above bias also makes four drops with 5 health and at least 3 attack better than those with 4 health again.

- A balanced deck should have about 5 one or two mana cards, 6 three drops, and 4 four drops. The 1-2 mana cards don't need to be drops, they can be utility cards that fill out mana and gain tempo on later turns.

- Having more big high value cards is more important considering the increase in removal, so the remaining half of your deck is removal + value. This would've been very bad in the old meta where you needed to curve out in early turns.

- Big value also includes small cards that generate more cards like Tomb Spider, the 4 mana 3/3 Beast that lets you Discover a Beast. This can help you win if the game turns into a top deck war.

 

Also here are the two bad points about the new meta:

- The increase in removal means the game is more luck dependent on drawing the right removal cards in your deck. This is bad if you were a high skill arena player who was good at setting up dominant boards and knew when to switch from trading minions to attacking face. Now that strategy is more likely to get punished. (The counterpoint to this is that setting up a dominant board was also probably luck dependent but in a less obvious way.)

- Classes were actually fairly balanced in the previous meta. Now the classes with relatively bad spells like Hunter, Druid and Warrior are not as competitive and should probably be avoided if you care about min-maxing win rate.

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I never seem to do well in Arena. It's probably due to the fact I barely play it, but I just don't really understand how to get any better because it seems so dependent on your drafting. I'd normally curve out pretty well, get some stuff removed and then just not have enough, or good enough, high drops to play in the later turns.

 

I've also been playing a lot of Wild recently as a Reno mage but it really hasn't gone well. Aggro seems just as crazy as it did in Standard and I can't play Standard due to missing a bunch of essential cards. It seems pretty crazy to me that I've spent hundreds of hours and probably upwards of 80 euros on this game and I still can't play I want to. I'm missing Arya so no Jade for me and I don't have Patches so no Pirate.

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Holy fuck, I just realized I dreamed last night that I had Patches and was playing it. What a crazy, specific thing to dream about.

 

Thanks for the big write-up, Latrine. I haven't done a lot of arena because of the cost of entry and not a lot of faith in my skills. So far I'm really enjoying the singleplayer content and the tavern brawls, which bring some truly bonkers play mechanics.

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You shouldn't let the cost of arena deter you. Arena rewards are structured in a way such that if you're a competent player (~50% win rate) you will almost certainly make back the cost of entry. If you're an above average player it's the best way to spend gold assuming you have the time for arena runs. (As a side note they're currently doing Heroic Tavern Brawl and while it looks similar to arena the rewards are structured in a way that makes it much more risky. I almost suspect it's a way to drain gold out of player's reserves before a new expansion comes out so people will spend more real money on it.)

 

How to get better at arena/in general:

- Use a tier list/tool when drafting. They're not perfect but when starting out you'll probably get a better deck using one of these. E.g., www.heartharena.com or www.thelightforge.com

- Use a deck tracker when playing. The extra UI these provide can help ease decision masking. I use this one: www.hsdecktracker.com

- Watch streams/VoDs of good players and actively try to predict their play on each turn.

- For crazy deep dives into arena and current meta there's the Lightforge podcast which you can find on this Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/adwcta.

- Hearthstone is a luck based game. Sometimes you'll just do bad due to variance. Don't let that put you on tilt.

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For those that haven't been keeping up wit Hearthstone, the new Journey to Un'Goro card set will be coming out soon, and if you play in the meantime you can earn card packs that will unlock once the new series comes out.  I'm incredibly excited about this new set, new quest and adapt mechanics are being introduced which I think should help to slow down the meta and make the card pool more dynamic.  

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Yes, logging in currently and doing tavern brawls means racking up free booster packs for Un'Goro, which is kind of Blizzard. It'll be the first expansion I'm witnessing since my return, so it feels like I can finally tag along with the meta game and make some competitive decks.

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What do you guys think of the new expansion? I got super lucky in my packs and got 4 legendaries (one golden!) and was able to make a few decks which I liked a lot. I haven't had much time to sit down and give it a go as I've been obsessed with Overwatch recently and that's taking up all my time. 

 

I can't really imagine how Blizzard will keep going with expanding the game by 500 odd cards a year when the focus seems to be on "new and players returning after a break" especially considering how exepensive the game is. I've heard people claiming upwards of $400 dollars to complete this expansion. That's just this expansion. Not that you'd need to do that, but still even $50 for a 50 pack booster pack with no guarentees of anything seems bananas to me. 

 

How is it being back after some time off Roderick? 

 

 

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I still play a couple times a weeks and I'm generally enjoying the new mechanics and cards available.  I've seen a lot of new interactions with cards and mechanics that make the game more exciting,  but my one reservation is that the game seems to become and even more solitary experience.  With all the new card combos possible, particularly with respect to quests, the game more often feels like you and your opponent are racing to fulfill some goal rather than playing against each other.  The quests aren't designed in such a way that avenues for engagement even exist for the opposing player (save perhaps for the rogue quest) which can lead to situations where you don't really need to consider your opponent's plays.  In other words, the new stuff has improved what hearthstone was good at before, but also makes it's detriments that much more noticable.  

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It's funny: I was super pumped during the time leading up to Un'Goro, and then when it hit it completely dropped my interest. The whole run towards it was fun, there were daily incentives to log in and I was accumulating gold for packs. Then the expansion hit, I opened ten-odd boosters, they were filled with crap, and I just shrugged my shoulders and haven't played it since. I'd have liked to build some decks around the quest cards, which seemed fun, but apparently those are legendary and you need to buy a hundred packs to get one.

 

I had fun for the two months I was replaying this, maybe I'll occasionally pick this up again to do some of the singleplayer content, but I've given up any ambition of multiplayer fun and building good decks. Too much effort and cost required.

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I've mostly switched to other computer CCGs, that also mostly are a lot more generous to low-budget players than Hearthstone. Right now Gwent's mostly grabbed my interest, and I occationally dip into Eternal, Duelyst and Elder Scrolls: Legends. I recommend trying those out, they're all very, very good in their own ways. ES:L especially manages to be a Hearthstonelike that adds a lot of interesting decision making.

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I was originally pessimistic about the new expansion because it felt like most of the quest cards have failed to create viable decks and the ones that are viable aren't that "fun and interactive" like Quest Rogue and Quest Taunt Warrior. But I'm starting to come around now that people have discovered more and more interesting interactions between the non-legendary cards that people originally thought would be bad. Also the meta still hasn't settled down ~1 month after launch and still feels a lot more diverse in terms of classes and archetypes within classes than most previous metas do by the 1 month mark. 

 

I will agree that Hearthstone feels far too expensive now for a casual free-to-play player. Especially since they're going to have two more Expansions this year instead of Adventures where you just get all the cards. In this expansion, in particular, it feels like you don't get what's promised in the lead up even if you buy the preorder for 50 packs. It's the fatiguing nature of the free-to-play business model setting in. At this point you either have to be a hardcore free-to-play player or willing to dump around $150 a year on cards. 

 

In terms of alternate card games I haven't really tried any but Shadowverse and Elder Scrolls: Legends both look interesting (these are the two games that Hearthstone Twitch streamers get most sponsored to play). Shadowverse's evolution system makes games feel more back and forth in the early turns, but the decks seem to have quite crazy power levels and high variance. For ES:L, the two lane system and the rune system, where your opponent gets to draw cards for being damaged, are interesting ways to balance these kinds of games. However this makes ES:L feel very slow and complicated by comparison and I find Hearthstone's simplicity more attractive. 

 

Btw, the reason these alternate games are more generous to low-budget players is because they're trying to compete with the big dog, Hearthstone. We'll see how it all shakes out but since Blizzard recently increased the cost of packs outside the US it looks like they're too successful for our own good. 

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